A short piece about telling stories well

Here are some tips to productive story telling as part of your promotional activities.

1 Continuously refine your stories. Is one of them too short? (Unlikely.) Is it too long? (Probably.) Have you missed something important? Have you used jargon? (If so, remove it: explaining it just clogs up the story, and not explaining it is discourteous.)

2 Make the story about the problem the client had and what you did to help them resolve it. Explanations of why your intervention worked are unlikely to be important if only because, if you tell the story well, the other person is bound to ask you.

3 Add specific detail—it was a car manufacturer, it was a hotel, whatever. The detail may be irrelevant to the point of the story, but it is not irrelevant to why you’re telling the story (detail better locates the story in reality which makes it more likely to be remembered).

4 Be careful naming names: clients may not like what they thought was confidential being talked about in public, particularly if it is not that favourable to them.

5 Strip out the details which are about you (not the client): eg, don’t say things like “it was a long time ago” or “I don’t really work in that area any more”, don’t say why or how you got to meet the client, unless it is directly relevant to your point.

6 Labour the point about the difficulties the client was having before they met you.

7 Be careful about how you stop. The ending is what the other person will remember most. If you want to pique their interest, you have to leave something unsaid in order to prompt a question like, “well how did you do that, then?” On the other hand, finish too early and they’ll feel irritated at being left high and dry.